The Prime Minister doesn’t make it easy on himself by having so few female
Cabinet ministers

The Conservative Party has got a women problem! Say it often enough and it’ll probably stick and become a problem, even if there wasn’t one to begin with. That is clearly the Labour Party’s strategy at the moment. Last Sunday, Harriet Harman, Labour deputy leader, claimed that “it’s raining men in the Tory party” after one Conservative MP, Anne McIntosh, was deselected by constituents. Never mind that the same thing happened to a chap, Tim Yeo, a few days later. Then at Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Ed Miliband waved at the all-male front bench and accused David Cameron of “failing women”.

How is it possible that Labour, never led by a woman, can accuse the party that produced the first female prime minister of having such a problem? Tory women are privately rather baffled. Although they come from a party that specialises in moaning, particularly about its leadership, one thing these female MPs don’t moan about is a “women problem”. They do not think their leader sexist, and are proud that Theresa May has enjoyed such success and longevity as Home Secretary. But there must be something that gives the “raining men” claim such traction, and it’s not just that only 16 per cent of the party is female.

As with many of the troubles hanging over the Conservative Party, the perception of a “women problem” has been created by a series of unfortunate events. Mr Cameron promised in opposition to make a third of his government female, without thinking about how hard this would be in practice with so few candidates (and when in Coalition with the Lib Dems, whose fine words on equality have left them with just seven women in the Commons). He made a very poor joke in the Commons in 2011 which no one understood, telling Angela Eagle to “calm down, dear” when she was heckling him. Mr Cameron already had form on rubbish jokes with his “too many tweets make a tw--” quip, but his retort to Ms Eagle was a gift to his opponents.

It was unfortunate no one twigged that Ms Harman’s “raining men” comment on the Andrew Marr Show at the weekend might foreshadow a Labour attack on gender balance at PMQs. Ed Miliband’s heart must have soared when he strolled into the Chamber just before noon and saw that no one had thought to coax one of the four female cabinet ministers on to the front bench. When the cameras turned to Mr Cameron, there were two women sitting behind him on the second row of Tory seats. One of them, unfortunately, was Anne McIntosh.

The Prime Minister doesn’t make it easy for himself, does he? These regular hiccups suggest a deeper malaise, and Labour has certainly ensured that everyone thinks there is one. Mr Miliband and Ms Harman can also boast that their party is doing better on this front, since 33 per cent of Labour MPs are women.

Though Mr Cameron has presided over a threefold increase in the number of female MPs (to a mighty 47 out of 302), he is to a certain extent being punished because his party isn’t artificially improving the gender balance using all-women shortlists. The progress is slower, but perhaps healthier in the long term: it is much harder to find a female duffer in the Tory party than a male one.

The party has tried extremely hard to improve matters through its Women2Win programme, which gives female candidates around six hours a week of coaching for selections and hustings. But some still fret that the parliamentary assessment boards for candidates haven’t always had the best mix of people sitting on them.

But Mr Cameron and his senior colleagues still aren’t doing everything they can to help those women who do make it into Parliament. Some of them complain that Mrs May “isn’t exactly sisterly” (although her allies say that, like Thatcher, she cares only about helping those who are good rather than setting up a female equivalent of an old boys’ club). And Mr Cameron also misses a trick by failing to appoint more women to stepping‑stone roles. Of the six MPs who have served as parliamentary private secretaries to Mr Cameron and George Osborne, only one – Amber Rudd – has been a woman. These PPS jobs are a perfect testing ground for rising stars, after which MPs often move into the whips’ office or junior ministerial roles. The PM could use PPS jobs as a sort of pipeline to feed talented women into the lower levels of government.

Of course, one of the biggest problems is that there simply aren’t as many women applying to be candidates as there are men. CCHQ won’t publish details of the percentage of applicants to the candidates’ list that are women, but a senior Tory source admits that “this is a big problem for us: we do not have enough women coming forward in the first place”. And presumably stories about a “women problem” in the party won’t encourage many more.